Dealing With Quotes
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How to Deal with Quotes
Here are some pointers I want you to observe when you write your paragraphs. TREAT THIS LIKE A SELF-CHECK.
Example Paragraph
In his poem “‘Out, Out--’” Frost’s vivid sensory language, especially in his ominous description of the buzz saw, strongly suggests that life is frighteningly fragile: the smallest of events can have immeasurably horrific consequences. The opening lines of Frost’s poem paint a vivid picture of everyday life in a working farm: a boy uses a buzz saw that “snarled and rattled” (1) as it “made dust” in cutting “stove-length sticks of wood” (2) for heating and cooking. Though Frost immerses us in the “sweet” scent of the cut wood and the striking mountain ranges (3-5) of his setting, the ominous sound of the buzz saw slices--literally and metaphorically--through this scene. It is a sound we will hear throughout the first part of the poem. Frost describes the saw immediately; it is the first object we see or hear as it growls through its “snarl[s] and rattle[s]” (1), a sound Frost stresses later by remarking that the saw “snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled” (7) between the boy’s cuts. The repetitive wording suggests the buzz saw’s choppy mechanical sound, but Frost’s ominously predatory diction hints at something grimmer: a snarling animal, perhaps, or a rattling snake, either one an immediate threat to human survival. As it turns out, the saw does indeed present a threat. In a moment Frost ironically describes in terms of a handshake--a gesture of open-handed courtesy, a demonstration that the handshaker carries no weapon--the saw “leaped out at the boy’s hand” (16 ) and as Frost adds with grim irony, “However it was/Neither refused the meeting” (17-18). From that moment, the boy is effectively dead, the “brief candle” of his life (as suggested in Frost’s title) now “out,” extinguished in an event that probably took a mere second. On a rereading, Frost’s vivid onomatopoeia seems even more menacing, and the boy’s life seems even more precariously perched on the edge of extinction. This is true, Frost implies, for us all. |